Free and Other Short Stories
by Prime627
Summary: Compilation of short stories, of no particular genre or type. Some may be funny and others may be sad. Read at your own risk


The room was ordinary. Ordinary chairs facing each other. Between them, as though sensing a brewing fight between the pieces of furniture, was an ordinary table bolted to the heated metal floor. The walls were decorated with sprays of blood that have been either hastily ignored or hastily swiped at with a rag and left to dry. Once a month, someone came in and scraped it all clean, but the unfortunate soul selected said he could only smell blood for days afterwards. Same, too, went for the person who cleaned the torture tools, including whips outfitted with the standard leather straps decorated with broken glass, the roots of teeth, and sharpened bits of metal. Torturers loved to give the weapon a rattle as he approached the bound victim, be it female or male, no matter their crime. Information was torn right out of their bodies.  
Most victims died right afterwards from infection, blood loss, or from simply giving up.  
But I meant to change that, starting with a worker of a concentration camp built to sort out the "unruly minority". According to her file, she was five foot and a half, had long black hair and green eyes, and weighed a hundred and thirty pounds. She is also tied to millions of deaths, and the big boss wants to know why.  
"She is not the face of a killer," he whispered over her picture, touching it delicately with a fingertip. "Bring me information I can use," he said, meaning torture was out of the question.  
Torture turned people into canaries. They sang about anything just to get the pain to stop. I myself had heard that their boss worked at a rundown carnival, and after we checked it out, guess what? Nothing. Not even a sniff of the enemy.  
How did this war start? Who knows? It's been going on for so long that we only know "the good old days", where people were kind, polite, and they weren't divided due to beliefs.  
We call this war RvB, or Red versus Blue, which is only comical when it's fictional characters going at it with guns and explosions and cool armor...and that one character who stops fire by shooting at it.  
Compared to this war, that is preferable. Everyone would be that guy, pleading with fire to stop it from burning by shooting at it. But in reality, we're the ones who grin into the flames and dump gasoline on them, begging them to grow and destroy. That doesn't mean that we're the bad guys. No, we think we're the good ones. We run into burning buildings to save women and children, and of course the men. We charge across no-man's-land to save horses and cattle, and then flip coins in storms with the enemies to see who keeps what. We see a need, and we fill it with the supplies we have, though some days it feels like putting a band aid on a bullet wound...or giving CPR to a corpse.  
Percy, our scientist/medic, often uses the last one to explain how bad a situation is. "Compared to this," he would riot, "giving CPR to a corpse and having it sit up and talk again is easy! What the big man wants is impossible!"  
I'm jolted from my thoughts when my commander slaps my chest with another file. It's more about the woman I am to interrogate, what his people infer based on her behavior in her cell, which, as I have found out, isn't reliable.  
But before I go there, I need a cup of hot chocolate and a plate of food.  
On my way there, I dump the extra file in the trash.  
OOOO  
She has her head down. Her hair shines in the light, left unwashed for months while she's waited for me. Her skin, lightly toned in the picture, is dark brown now from dirt and grime, probably due to labor the guards put her through, either mining ore or scrubbing the walls with her toothbrush, and then using that toothbrush...she smells too, and had I thought ahead, I would have brought an entire shower with me.  
But mashed potatoes and a turkey leg is all I have to give. And a cup of hot chocolate.  
I set them both in front of her, stabbing the fork into the turkey leg. I set the file down, straighten the paper cargo within it, and then sit across from her.  
Her hands are cuffed to the table, so she can only wiggle her fingers, but even that has given people in this chair, sitting like I am, enough prompt to beat their skulls in.  
"Uncuff her," I order, flipping open the file.  
Her eyes lift in minor surprise. I suppose it is rather shocking to hear those words, since she's been shackled her entire time here. Even the guards standing by the door are frozen in shock.  
"...sir?"  
"Do I need to repeat myself?"  
I'm not usually snippy. I have to say this. I have enough patience for anyone and anything, but I do not like repeating myself when my order has been said clearly and understandably.  
One of the guards walks over with a golden key and he uncuffs her. Immediately, her hands shoot out. The guard flips. I smile.  
The turkey leg is lifted off the plate and pressed to her dirty face, grease leaking down her chin and into her lap, though she doesn't mind or care. Even cold, the meat is delicious compared to jail food, which is normally fed rancid, and the only way to wash that horrible taste down is with water collected from no-man's-land, which is practically underwater all the time, even in drought, which we are suffering through as we speak. We squeak by. The prisoners feel the pain themselves. I can't imagine eating a raw potato and letting that float around in a stomach full of dirty water promising disease and parasites.  
I wave off the guard, who has calmed down and stares at her in surprise. He didn't expect her to go for the food rather than my throat. Perhaps now he understands...  
"Good, isn't it? You can thank our cooks. I wish I could give them the orders to share, but I haven't been able to do anything about it. The big man is trying, honest he is."  
"We know," she whispered, setting the bone down on the table. She pushed the mashed potatoes away and went for the cup, which would have been my move. I smiled. She smiled. The guards frowned.  
"Okay. I'm afraid I must ask some questions."  
She tensed. For months she has been questioned by the prison guards, harassed and tortured, probably abused, but I try not to think about what I can't change.  
The guards see themselves superior, even though some may have been siblings or parents that had different views and chose one side or the other. Some prisoners are some guards' neighbors, bearing the same background and pedigree, and yet the guards put themselves on a higher ground.  
"What is your favorite color?"  
This throws her, visibly. She stares at me, her eyebrows knitting together as she thinks hard. "Blue..."  
"Mine is green." I made a note, which turned into a doodle of a kitten. I smiled down at it, then looked at her. She was relaxing, but not enough for me to dig. Why dig a field of stones when dirt awaits further away? "Okay. Favorite book?"  
"Divergent."  
I have never read it, though I pretend I do. "Interesting! Did you read it all the way through? I couldn't get past the first page. Fell asleep. I have a short attention span."  
She kneads the table, working the dust on it into piles. "I read it five times," she whispers. She's embarrassed.  
"Five tim-!" I run my fingers through my hair. "Holy cow...five?"  
She nods and looks up at me.  
I smile as invitingly as I can manage. "I like The Scorpio Races."  
She is braver than me. She admits she hasn't read it.  
"No? I'll loan it to you sometime. Okay?"  
She nods and like a book with a worn spine, she falls open. I dig a little to test the ground. It's safe. She spills forth like someone opened a flood gate in her mouth and eyes, tears splashing down into the dust. I order for a box of tissues and I get paper towels. Sandpaper at its finest. I throw them back. I am rewarded with tissues, soft and inviting. She holds the square in her hands, not wanting to smudge its pristine white with her misery, but she does, and she takes several more. I let her. The guards behind me are appalled at my behavior.  
I listen with an open mind. I am all ears, and she is all words. She is a novel, and I have judged her by her cover.  
I will never make the same mistake again.  
OOOO  
At first, I and several others just cataloged. We kept the prisoners' things in order, labelled and stored alphabetically. When the general needed something, he would summon for it, and we would give it over. It was easy. We thought nothing of it. We were praised for our diligent work, rewarded with gifts of sweets and money, which we were allowed to spend on clothes and jewelry. We liked looking professional for when the general came, because he referred to us as his best team.  
A couple months of that and we became a little more involved. We got to prepare food or give orders on what to feed the prisoners. We were several floors above them still, though we could hear them. A few of us got to meet them as we rotated in the serving portion of the kitchen, and we remember how ghastly they were, how underfed, how miserable they looked, but the promise of money and gifts after a job well done...the monotony of serving food, seeing the same thin faces...we became too familiar. We were...conditioned. It no longer frightened us.  
The general said we got different jobs every so often to make us well-rounded individuals, which made sense. We were told switching jobs made us more aware, made us better people, and allowed for skills to come forth we didn't know we had. We all wanted that...so when the next job shift changed, where we were to escort the prisoners from place to place, be it showers or food or bedtime, we didn't think anything of it. Some of us were really good at giving orders, others were good at keeping things moving smoothly.  
Our frequency of money and gifts doubled, and we were eager for a job shift.  
We were promoted, eventually, to guards, and then we herded the prisoners into the gas chambers. By then, we believed ourselves to be higher than that of our prisoners. They were mere animals and we were smarter than they...it is all so easy to believe when you start out slow...if the general and commander had gone too fast in the transitions, it would not have worked. But they were patient with us...and we were so willing and eager to please...  
OOOO  
I needed time to stomach this after hearing her story. I delayed my visit with the big boss, but eventually wound my way to him.  
He is a tall man, with broad shoulders. If one were to draw a cartoon of him, the reference would be an upside-down Doritos chip with legs and arms. Both in real life were well muscled and tanned from his jaunts under the harsh glare of the sun, shooting down enemy bombers and dragging out survivors from traps and jail cells. Around his neck were several dog tags. Only one belonged to him. The rest were his friends' after they died. On top of the tags sat a strange pendant with a strange gem set inside it. No one knew its origin. On his head sat a ratty ball cap displaying the fading emblem of a car company no longer producing cars. Instead, they focused on weapons. Today he wore a simple T-shirt and jeans, but some days he suited up in all-camo gear. I would joke that I couldn't see him and he would allow me, but lately the joke seemed futile in easing tension.  
Also today, he wore a bracelet. It was leather straps keeping a cross against his skin under his wrist. Hardly anyone knew the big man to be religious, but he was. As was I. Some days, while there was a standstill in the fighting, he'd sit down, pull out a little black book and a pen, and he would make notes in the margins as he read.  
His commander, who took the name Magnum, joked it was his diary, but both myself and Magnum knew it was his Bible.  
I interrupted my boss from reading the titles of books, his head angled to one side. He pivoted to see me and slowly straightened his neck. "You have troubling information..."  
To assist the hard pill to swallow, the boss called Percy to be a witness. When I had finished relaying the story, the red-haired medic was shaking his head.  
"Does not make sense. They should have known that it was wrong."  
The big boss was big in Psychology. He stroked the cover of a textbook from a library we raided once. For books.  
Even we big men with guns crave more than guns and bullets. We needed an escape from the war. We wanted an alternate world to step in for just a little while to carry us through.  
"Perhaps," he whispered, "it has something to do with the way they were conditioned."  
"Psychology, Pax? You are going to fall back on PSYCHOLOGY?! That is a worthless science. No one can comprehend the level of the brain. We must resort to logic, reasoning, common sense!"  
The boss man had several names, all meaning something. I called him Orion because when we'd star-gaze (and that we did often) as troops and had the boss as a troop leader, he was the first to point the constellation out. Pax, used by Percy, was a jab at how he over packed everything. Going on a two day trip? Bring enough supplies for five days, "just in case". 75% of the time, we appreciated that he WAS a pack rat, because his long-cuts were short-cuts and his short-cuts were long-cuts. For that, he earned the name Mappy from his friend, Magnum.  
"So because we do not know something, we should steer clear of it?"  
"It is better than jumping into the unknown. Why complete a math problem if there is no answer?"  
"For the enjoyment."  
I broke up the fight. "Guys...we have a prisoner headed for jail because of her confession."  
Pax looked at me slowly, tearing his gaze from Percy. "Mace...what do you recommend?"  
"Let me take her on as an apprentice. I can uncondition her, put whatever conditioning she received into extinction. Boss...I can do this..."  
Percy shook his head in disbelief, shaking it even more when the boss man agreed.  
So it was that I returned to the interrogation room.  
I'm a big guy, okay? I'm nearly six foot three, wear cowboy boots, a matching hat, a leather belt, dark jeans and a dark vest. I'm intimidating. When I move, all my weaponry jangles. Chains around my midsection clack and grind against each other. Guns and bullets cry out from the contact they share with each other. Knives stick out and jut out at odd angles.  
But it helps if you also bring a little piece of paper with the boss' seal on it saying you can remove one (1) prisoner by the name of Falcon.  
The first thing we did was get her a shower. Then a proper meal. Then her own bed (in my quarters) and bed sheets and a dresser. All the fixings she needed came from the storage room, checked out under her brandy-new account we opened on the way there, where she can charge for things she needed and gain points back for returning them, such as books and writing supplies and even a pet.  
She, with my permission, brought home a falcon because I thought it would be funny. It was to be used as a messenger. I alerted the boss man before hand, and he approved my request with two big thumbs way, way up.  
"Will I be safe here? No one seems to like me..."  
"I like you. The boss likes you. Percy likes you because it's cool, but we liked you before that."  
"Why?"  
"Because you ARE cool. And we like having an Ace up our sleeve in this poker game."  
She shook her head, sitting on her mattress with her falcon on her arm. It stared at me with steely eyes, snapped its beak a little. I guess it was hungry for my fingers. I wasn't going to part with them so soon. "I'm of no use to you, sir..."  
"Sure ya are. You jus' don' know it yet."  
She looked at me skeptically, but in that dominance game I won. She dropped her gaze first, accepting that it was true. She had worth on our team.  
Now I just had to prove it to everyone else.


End file.
